To the Reverend Jacob Bailey

I receiv'd your favour of Decr. 29.2 about 3 or 4 Days after it was wrote. The bearer left it at the Tavern and proceeded
on his journey, so that I despair'd of ever getting an opportunity of answering it,
till this moment. I heartily sympathize with you in your affliction, which I am the
better qualified to do as I am confined myself to a like place of Torment. When I
compare The gay, the delightsome scenes of Harvard with the harsh, and barbarous nature
of sounds that now constantly grate my Ears I can hardly imagine myself the same being,
that once listen'd to Our Mayhews Instructions,3 and revell'd in all the other pleasures of an accademical Life. Total and Compleat
misery has succeeded so suddenly to total and compleat Happiness, that all the Phylosophy
I can muster can scarce support me under the amazing shock. However one source of
pleasure is left me still and that is the Letters of my Friends, and the more streams
flow from this source the greater is my Pleasure. I should be extremely glad therefore
of a Correspondence with you, and I promise you I will improve every opportunity of
writing to you. If you see any of my old Friends, tell them I am well and should take
a line from them very kindly.—But I can add no more now, than that I am

[salute] Your Friend & sert.,

[signed] J. Adams

Pardon all our epistolary sins.

MS not found. Printed from a facsimile of RC in (William S. Bartlet, The Frontier Missionary: A Memoir of the Life of the Rev. Jacob Bailey, A.M. . . .
), Boston, 1853, following p. 34. According to a note at the foot of p. 34, the “letter
is thus superscribed: 'To Mr. Jacob Bailey, Schoolmaster, at Kingston, N. Hampshire
These.' ”

1. Jacob Bailey (1731–1808), a college classmate of JA, Harvard 1755, led a life marked by many wanderings and vicissitudes, largely because
he was converted to the Church of England in 1759 and clung uncompromisingly to his
tory principles in spite of years of privation and abuse. At this time he was keeping
a school in Kingston, N.H., relished his work at least as little as JA did his at Worcester, but found relief in his lifelong penchant for writing verse,
which ranged from the sentimental to the Hudibrastic. At just about this time Bailey
was composing poems that contrasted the rustic manners of a New Hampshire village
with the charms of college life in Cambridge: “Alas! for I languish, I moan and complain/
For the absence of Harvard and all her bright train;/ Forever my thoughts that kind
mother pursue,/ And all her past fondness present to my view.”

Following his ordination in London in 1760, Bailey was assigned an “enormous frontier
parish”—the whole Kenne• { 12 } beck region in Maine—and braved poverty, Maine winters, the menaces of his neighbors,
and the threats of civil authorities until 1779, when he sailed for Nova Scotia and,
after some years, became rector of Annapolis. See Bartlet's Memoir, cited in the descriptive note above, and Sibley-Shipton, Harvard Graduates, 13:522–545. For his (largely unpublished) verse, with extracts and commentary, see
Ray Palmer Baker, “The Poetry of Jacob Bailey, Loyalist,” NEQ, 2:58–92 (Jan. 1929).